sunday evening i made a moonsketch and observed saturn with 4 moons.
monday morning a got up at 4 local time to observe Jupiter. the seeing wasn't too bad so i made a sketch, in fact it's the first good look i got at jupiter for 3 years, two weeks short!
i also found neptune for the first time, that leaves only pluto to be seen!

at 5 i turned my scope for a quick look at venus and decided to try finding mars again, i looked for it 2 days ago and couldn't detect it. by a stroke of luck i found it just 30 minutes before sunrise very difficult to make out of the skyglow at first. it's still only 4.7" big, so i couldn't make out anything except perhaps for the slight gibbeous phase and the northern hemisphere being noticeably lighter than the other.

all in all i enjoyed a good weekend with some sketching time, which has been a while between the time i observed saturn yesterday evening to my first glimpse of mars were about 5 hours which means i got 5 planets in 5 hours

Nice set of sketches. I'm glad you were able to locate Mars--that's a nice widefield view with a hint of the light and dark albedo that you mention in your post. You're getting the Mars sketching season off to an early start--that's only the second drawing of Mars I've seen this apparition (here's the first).

The rift in the South Equatorial Belt (SEB) and the irregular appearance of the North Equatorial Belt (NEB) in your Jupiter sketch are striking and accurate. Look at this image by Emil posted from The Netherlands. Jupiter was at an altitude of 19Â° in this image so it was made less than an hour after your sketch. The ragged NEB is quite noticeable. In the intervening time between sketch and image, the Great Red Spot has rotated into view--it must have been just around the limb at the time of your drawing.

thanks for the image links Michael, seems i'm not the only one crazy enough to try sketching mars after all this guy uses a huge template though for tiny mars, but he saw a clear dark & light division just like me. i couldn't detect any snowcap. 11Â° above the horizon is a new low for me, not many detail to see yet.it's great to see some confirmation with my jupiter sketch

You really got out there and went after the planets. The Jupiter sketch is nicely detailed as Michael pointed out. It is never too early to look at Mars. It certainly looks like Mars just very far beyond the sun. Very nice post.

Excellent observations of Mars and Jupiter. You have recorded detail over the major belts (NEB and SEB) very nicely. I am glad that you were finally able to observe Mars. I hope to study both planets soon myself. Thank you for sharing them with us all.

lol - yeah thats Mars at that size and the atmosphere pushes it and pulls it and shoves it and squeezes it. Its tough to make a good ob because the sky is so important when an object is that size. Real embarrassment comes however when you log in your records that you made out the polar cap only to find you called it wrong and it was merely the maria giving the illusion of a polar cap.